| In St. Petersburg, a fashion arose to consider tsars as people First of September. One after another, excursion buses arrive at the terracotta fortress - Mikhailovsky Castle. A noisy crowd of smartly dressed schoolchildren is led through the ceremonial gates into the courtyard, in the center of which a monument to the eccentric Emperor Paul has recently been erected. In past years, a similar ritual, with a column of buses, junior high school students in white collars and discipline-observing teachers, took place somewhere near the monument to the heroes of the revolution or Ilyich voting with his cap. And now - on you, the neurasthenic from the romantic novel, autocrat Pavel. The children are making noise, clicking their soap dishes, exchanging impressions: “This is not a king, but an unfortunate homeless person. I feel sorry for him." The destruction of the sacred image of power in the minds of the young, unfamiliar generation seems to have occurred irrevocably and completely. Surprisingly, this very action organized by schools (going to pay respects to a person whose fate symbolized not the norm, but a perversion, an eternal split between public and private) has an educational meaning. But the goal is the opposite of the ever-memorable times. Mikhailovsky Castle, building - self-portrait of the owner. The same dislocated, neurasthenic, irregular. It turns out that on Knowledge Day, children go to learn to distinguish the boundaries of privacy, to treat with understanding and compassion those who are not like you, different from everyone else. Even if he is a king. By the way, the new monument created by Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts V. Gorev fully meets this noble educational goal. Pavel Petrovich is depicted as a sensitive, nervous and subtle person (the barely outlined “rocaille” shades of spiritual movements were inherited by the sculptor from the first brilliant sculptor-portrait painter Pavel - Fedot Shubin). And the horror is that the royal regalia and attributes mercilessly, stupidly, evilly ridicule his “privacy”. They crush, mutilate, crucify. In them the king is a clumsy buffoon. Homeless.
It is curious that the “private” perspective also became decisive at the main anniversary exhibition in St. Petersburg - the donation of the first museum of the northern capital, the Hermitage, to its founder Peter Alekseevich. The great power rhetoric that accompanies such projects in Moscow is no longer there. Apparently, Peter himself did not give her a reason. The exhibition in the gigantic Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace represented the personality of an armchair scientist rather from the Baroque era, a time when, however, the office was thought of on the scale of the Universe. Globes, maps, microscopes, architectural paintings, portraits, botanical atlases, bestiaries... These were then used to compile cabinets of curiosities, according to RAS employee Natalya Kopaneva, based on the ideas of Francis Bacon, “museums of observations and “deviant examples”, which were designed to clear the mind from the “idols” that stood in the way of knowledge.” Apparently, today we too are clearing ourselves of such “idols” in the perception of the historical aura of power. Sergey KHACHATUROV, St. Petersburg - Moscow |
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